This was
originally intended to be two short posts to introduce you guys to the blog,
but…

…I got all
kinds of serious about it, so here’s my not so brief part 1 about “Design” and
the Design Blogosphere, of which we are a part. (Part 2 will be up on Tuesday and will be much shorter, I
promise, but surely more controversial.
Yay!) Bear with me, maybe
you’ll be enlightened, or maybe you’ll get angry, or perhaps you’ll laugh and
not care—you’ll at least get a little recent history of our field. Leave a response in the comments and
let me know.

The Traditional Geography

In the past
couple decades the traditional design-architecture discipline has become
increasingly diverse. (I know I
must have just shocked you with that surprise.) The formerly neat (-ish) Architectural discipline grew into
a blurrier, messier area that could somehow accommodate the work of BIG, Peter Zumthor, Hernan Dias Alonso,
IDEO, and the Festival d’Architecture
Vivre in Montpellier, France, underneath a single, albeit stretchy,
umbrella.

In lay
terms, traditional architecture grew into a highly diverse—and continuously
diversifying—field that celebrated its own unique and extreme fads, which, in
turn, continued to push the expansion of the discipline. But this diversification ultimately
precipitated the dissolution of the discipline’s traditional boundaries
altogether, turning it instead into Design, a term appropriately familiar and
vague. Under the auspices of
Design, architecture-trained “designers” produced giant metallic balloons, air
filtering systems that appear and act as organism, Zaha’s swarm, and a wall of
proximity-activated fans, all in the spirit of “investigating” or “discovering”
or “exploring the ideas” and possibilities the evolving field afforded.

Established
notions of Architecture were joined by Strategies
and Design Intelligence, and by big
brand architects touting problem-solving methodologies that delivered the best
possible solutions to a commission or
competition (ehem, children of Rem Koolhaas). Meanwhile, Design’s most vanguard and diverse factions began
incorporating elements of mechanical engineering, organic science,
mechanical/digital production, environmental hyper-performance, new (ornamental)
materials, new scripting technologies for ‘active’ architecture, and all manner
of curiosities that furthered Design’s variform evolution. As new technologies were integrated
into Design thinking, even more applications and possibilities for experimentation
were born.

So we
arrive at today (or, let’s say, the last 5-7 yrs), with the speed and
extremities of Design’s evolved and hybrid form(s) being too high and numerous
to count. This is, at least, the
narrative for a Design descendant from Architecture, and is very much a part of
[academic] Design thinking. But
this is a traditional geography for a
field that so tremendously outgrew its original limits long ago, a view that
jealously guards the prestige of Architecture from the wider-ranging regions of
Design.

Truly,
Design’s rapid evolution continues to be a reality. For some, Design stops right around the area where “arts and
crafts” draw near. Beyond this
false boundary it seems less prestigious, less academic. But the reality is that the same
energetic elements that brought the Architect’s skills to bare on external
applications have gained more strength, more information, more material, and
have evolved at breathtaking speed far beyond this academic distinction of
Design. These elements have
diversified beyond limitation and unified the adjacent but formerly separate
worlds of art, interior design, industrial design, graphic design, textiles,
printing, &c. The former
liminal spaces between disciplines are now more crucially important than ever
before, and are populated by multitudes of artist-designers borrowing,
combining, and trading in elements and influences from different areas of
Design at large.

Our Brave New World (and its map)

Fortunately
I don’t have to describe the breadth of Design. Let me simply say that Design is the area marked out by the
following four links: Archinect, Uppercase, Contemporist, and Co.DESIGN. Or, even more simply, a definition of
Design can be gleaned from clicking over to our Prjkt Dump page. The
fortune is that, parallel to the drastic, inclusive evolution of our field
something else has evolved: the Design Blogosphere.

The Design
Blogosphere is like the Borgesian map that is life size and extends beyond all
the land and is simultaneously the land and the map at the same time (more
posts on this fab topic later). It
is the manifestation of the active, productive, changing world in which we
partake, as artists or designers or what have you. What the blogosphere enables is the merging of the smaller,
formerly distinct areas into a single, massive fabric. Now, more than ever, the different
disciplines of art and architecture (and, yes, “craft”), of our visual and
material culture (and our built
environment) are increasingly informed by each other, are aware of each other,
and are progressively blurring their edges into the in middle ground to create
intersections full of fascinating possibility.

And if I
were to put a definition of Design to words, let me say that it’s the unified
incorporation of all the interconnecting sub-fields of art and architecture,
and culture, and academia, and technology, and product design, and graphic
design, and data visualization.
Design is what happens in the liminal space where one field blurs into
another; is the product of that intersection, aesthetically reformulated to
partake in visual culture in a new way.
Design is what happens when Gabriel
Dawe is influenced by spatial installations , light studies, and
textiles/fibers and produces her Plexus
series, which in turn becomes an influence for others. Design is also Berndnaut Smilde’sNimbus
projects, and Sou Fujimoto’s 2013 Serpentine
Pavilion.

The Design
Blogosphere is the form, the layout of this inclusive mega-field. It is where
new aesthetics and styles are defined, and where each new liminal area is
identified by the projects that come out of it and are posted and shared across
the internet. It is where
artists-designers and their work enter the context of Design, where they
partake in the fluid process of influence
and further articulate shared ideas in different dialects and skills. The
Design Blogosphere, then, forms the most inclusive body of design
research/intelligence.

Even the
fads that pushed architecture beyond its original boundary are now taking place
laterally, across the whole Design spectrum. Not just fads in architecture—such as the sexy products of
parametricism, which was itself incorporated from other fields of study and now
takes many forms (urban plans, buildings, interior treatments, installations,
furniture, public spaces)—or graphic fads—like hand lettering, or subway and
urban maps applied to any array of objects (posters, Ts, quilts, plates,
rugs)—but there the super fads like curated shopping (fab.com). There’s also the DIY movement, which
has been a great part of influence spreading across the Design spectrum and
which can claim at least partial parentage to an architecture master’s
student’s studio project I’ve recently learned about: a DIY plywood Farnsworth
House kit (life size).

I’m not
trying to argue for a broader definition of Design or to make a case for the
existence or value of the blogosphere.
Design is simply widely inclusive because there is no limiting what it
is drawing from and permanently incorporating into the interactions of
collective memory and influence.
Design will not be put back in an academic box. And the Design blogosphere exists
because it is our medium for understanding and interacting with each other and
our field, and because this is the 21st century. Its value comes in its ease, its accessibility,
and its ability to fairly accurately portray how influence works by grouping
together wildly different types of projects on the same site. Both are evolving with too much energy
and too great a breadth for individuals to keep up—or almost anyway; I’ll still
try.